Rhythm is arguably the most rudimentary and primal part of music. Probably the first form of music, it's roots can't be traced back far enough. It's made quite an evolution from tribal chants to some of the incredibly complex rhythms we find today. It comes as no surprise that technology has played an important part in it's evolution, challenging drummers and musicians alike; the drum machine has changed the way we listen to and expect modern music to sound.

The first drum machine was actually created in 1949, and resembled the Mellotron in it's tape-based playback construction. Wurlitzer created a similar machine about 10 years later called the "Sideman", which was a large wooden case designed to sit next to an organist - designed purely from discrete components and 13 tubes (no ICs or computer chips), strangely it had no snare drum sound. A nightclub owner in Tokyo started working on his own machine, frustrated with his own erratic Wurlitzer Sideman, and dubbed it the "DoncaMatic", literally because it went "donca, donca, donca...". His company was later renamed Korg, and went on to manufacture many other electronic musical devices in the 1980s.

In 1972, the soon-to-be-king of drum machines was founded by Ikutaro Kekehashi in Japan. The TR-77, TR-55, and TR-33 were the first drum machines Roland introduced, and then followed them up with the computerized TR-330, TR-700, and TR-66. But in 1980 they released the most influential drum machine ever, the TR-808. A unique analog design, the TR-808 began the revolution of drum machines in popular music - it has been the drum machine used most by dance, pop, rap, and R&B artists to produce the rhythm tracks for their songs to this day. The famous cowbell sound at the beginning of Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance with Somebody", or the famous droning kick drum sound that vibrates the ground are classic examples. Future drum machines have always included the TR-808 sounds as part of their sound libraries.

At the same time, Roger Linn released the famous LM-1, a drum machine that has almost become as famous for it's use of EPROM chips, or special computer chips that could store recorded drum sounds and play them back on command. Resembling a sampler, the LM-1's sounds were famous on numerous early rap tracks, and to those on the Minneapolis scene, Prince's album "1999" is almost completely backed by Linn's machine. Companies such as E-mu and Oberhiem would soon follow in the design of their machines, and sample-based drum machines would soon overwhelm the market, replacing the singular design of the TR-808 forever.

In the mid-80's, other companies joined the bandwagon, such as Yamaha (RX11, RX5), Casio (RZ-1), Alesis (HR-16, SR-16), but no other company held as strong as Roland. After purchasing a small guitar-pedal company called Boss, together they created the DR-660 drum machine in 1992, and it held strong as the leader in drum machines for nearly 7 years (a long time in the tech field), until retiring it with the recently released DR-770. All of these drum machines, despite their small size, hold nearly 250 sampled drum sounds, built-in effects such as chorusing and reverb, and memory for storing hundreds or thousands of drum patterns, all in a box about the size of a paperback book.

When drum machines finally started creating appreciable drum sounds, they took over the role of the "session drummer" in the recording studio for a time. Many a drummer became worried that their jobs were going to be overtaken by these machines. It proved later, however, that these machines lacked in "feel" what they gained in timekeeping. It soon became widely known that a good drummer can sound more musically interesting and satisfying when the beats aren't _exactly_ in their place - the rushing and dragging were actually important parts of rhythm that built and released tension, making the music sound less stiff and mechanical. The machine educated most musicians in the field of "feel", or lack thereof - it turned out that trained drummers were already some of the best drum programmers. Some drummers challenged themselves physically to become as "tight" as their mechanical counterparts, and drum programmers found themselves with the difficult job of making their machine "groove" - a challenge still fought to this day.

Recently drum machines have taken a different turn for their pioneering days. Since the days of the preset swing, samba, cha-cha, and foxtrot patterns with sounds based on pure white noise, companies such as QuasiMidi release products like the "Rave-O-Lution 309", which include nearly every techno beat you can imagine, as well as samples of samples of well-known snare and hi hat sounds used in dance clubs. It seems as though drum machines are tailoring themselves to a format instead of breaking new ground. But then again, what else is there to do after your machine has a library of 500 different drum sounds? The future of drum machines still moves forward, albeit slower than before, but will continue to be a staple of popular musicians the world over.